Box fuels international expansion with new funding

Telstra in Australia will start selling its service soon and a launch in Japan is planned for next year

Investments from network operators Telstra, Telefónica and others will help fuel Box's international expansion.

The cloud storage vendor has received US$100 million via investments and commercial agreements, it said on Thursday.

Telstra said it will start offering secure file-sharing and collaboration solutions to its Australian business customers in the coming months. In the past, maintaining control of file access and user privileges was a challenge for customers, but Box now has the tools to overcome that, according to Telstra.

To build on its existing management features, Box last week acquired the technology behind a company called dLoop, which it will use to add controls that give enterprises more features for protecting their content.

The technology from dLoop uses machine-learning to help discover documents that are normally unreachable by search or pattern matching solutions, according to Box. Once it has integrated the dLoop technology, Box will automatically be able to find the content most relevant to enterprise administrators, the company said when the deal was announced.

Working with network operators to help spread the use of its services is nothing new for Box. The company already works with the likes of mobile network EE in the U.K. and with German mobile and fixed network operator Deutsche Telecom.

The deals Box has now signed will also result in an official launch in Japan some time next year. They build on work the company has already done in Europe during the last 18 months. The company first opened an office in London last year, and has since opened outposts in Munich and Paris. Earlier this year Box also organized its first European customer conference in the British capital.

Box has more than 20 million users worldwide at more than 180,000 businesses, it said. That is up from 150,000 businesses and 15 million users in March.